Speeding up in-store pickups for online orders
Orders placed on Sears, Roebuck and Co.’s Sears.com are ready for in-store pickup within an average of 90 minutes to 2 hours, but that’s not good enough, Sears says. It’s targeting 15-30 minutes, Bill Christopher, chief of customer care for Sears Customer Direct, told attendees at the Annual Catalog Conference in Chicago this week.
Christopher, who appeared on a panel discussing ways to deliver on the promise of multi-channel retailing, joined executives from retailers REI, The Sharper Image and Orvis in sharing insights on how merchants are strengthening their in-store pickup service.
Sears, in a project that will take several months, is taking two major steps to expedite its service, Christopher said. It’s re-coding software to better organize batch reports of online orders passed on to stores, and it’s charging store personnel to work out faster means of checking in-store availability of merchandise ordered online for store pickup. Sears fulfills about 60% of its online/in-store pickup orders through store inventory, the remainder from distribution centers. By checking store inventory more quickly for more than half of these orders, Sears should be able to reduce the average time it takes to get online orders ready for pickup, Christopher said.
The average time from online orders to available in-store pickup is about three or four days, said Lauren Freedman, president of research and consulting firm The E-Tailing Group, who moderated the panel. She noted that Circuit City is a recognized leader, with an average time of 15 minutes.
Other retailers said shortening the time from online orders to in-store pickup was not as important. REI’s time is one to two weeks, depending on a store’s location, including shipments of larger items like canoes and kayaks, said vice president of online programs Joan Broughton. She added that REI tells online customers at the time of order how long they’ll have to wait for store pickup, and that the absence of shipping charges makes the service popular, especially for large items in its paddling category.
REI store managers support the store pickup program, even though the actual dollar amounts of the purchases are credited to the online operation, Broughton said. Online orders picked up in stores count toward the stores’ sales goal incentive programs, and stores realize on average $90 in incremental store sales from online customers arriving for store pickups. “If each channel weren’t compensated in some way, this wouldn’t work,” Broughton said.
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